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On a land development platform, Coun. Allan Vinni announces mayoral run

Councillor Allan Vinni, who currently represents Ward 3 on Wood Buffalo's council, announced he is running for mayor during a press conference near the Snye on Thursday, July 13, 2017. Vincent McDermott/Fort McMurray Today/Postmedia Network

“I’m not running against Don Scott, I’m running to be the mayor of this region,” he said. “I’m running because I’ve been there for seven years and I think I have a good understanding of what we need to do and how it needs to be done in municipal government.”

Vinni, who wore a tie he said was a gift from Scott, said he had “nothing personal” against his opponent who used to be his legal partner.

During an hour-long press conference at Rex Terpening Landing at the Snye, Vinni touched on several land development concerns as key issues that have plagued the municipality.

He criticized the pace in which the province released land to the municipality before oil prices collapsed in 2014 as too slow, calling it “a system more akin to Stalin’s Russia than it is to the free market that prevails throughout the modern western world.”

When asked about downtown development, he said council “built a bubble during the good times” and that developers picked up on that trend.

“They don’t trust the land. They don’t trust the land price,” he said. “You can’t trust land prices in an environment that’s not a fair, open market. We need to fix the land system.”

While he did not outright criticize Scott, he argued many approaches to encourage oil companies to convince their commuter workforce to live in Fort McMurray would not work. Encouraging a commuter airline to fly workers to remote work sites out of the Fort McMurray International Airport would be far more ideal, he argued.

“People think we haven’t been talking to them. We have, we’ve had a lot of fierce conversations with them,” he said. “They’re freely operating businesses in a free and democratic country. They’re not going to make business model changes.”

There are several lawsuits surrounding the incident, as many former tenants continue to pay mortgage payments on their former properties. Vinni said he owned four units at the complex.

“I say to anybody, rich or poor, try taking $10,000 a month and burning it. Let’s see how you like it. Let’s see how long you hang in there,” he said. “If people are concerned about doing business with bankrupt people, or having bankrupt people in charge, they will probably be surprised to learn of all the successful people in this town who have gone bankrupt in the past.”